A Rim with a View: Modernist Studies and the Pacific Rim Cover Image

A Rim with a View: Modernist Studies and the Pacific Rim
A Rim with a View: Modernist Studies and the Pacific Rim

Author(s): Stephen Yao
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Other Language Literature, Cultural Anthropology / Ethnology
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego

Summary/Abstract: This essay outlines an agenda for the study of modernist cultural production that focuses on the dynamics of movement and transformation within the context of a particular geographical formation, namely the ‘Pacific Rim.’ In such an approach, I argue, the rigors and opportunities of an expressly transnational comparative methodology take center stage. The conscientious development of a ‘view from the Rim’ entails more than simply acknowledging the fact of geography. Rather, it involves a dedicated attention to tracing the manifold historical and material relations among groups within the area and beyond along a number of different vectors, as well as attending to how these relations at once occasion and condition cultural production. For literary concerns in particular, such vectors include, but are by no means limited to, the particularities of language and various dimensions of power such as asymmetrical economic arrangements underwritten by military and political domination expressed through a variety of channels. In advancing this set of concerns, I also suggest that Modernist Studies in general can enrich its approach to both the decidedly international cultural scope and subsequent global spread of Modernism by entering into an engagement not only with Area Studies, but also with more recently emergent (as well as non-historically defined) fields such as Ethnic Studies.

  • Issue Year: 4/2010
  • Issue No: 1-2
  • Page Range: 36-39
  • Page Count: 4
  • Language: English